Biographies

I've been doing research on Maxfield Parrish at the moment, and the whole process of compiling even the shortest of biographies is astounding. First of all, inaccuracies are rampant - not just for Parrish, but for everyone profiled. Was in '85 or '86? Were the problems health or financial? So many small details, crucial to the person living the life, just get jumbled up in a pile, mislabeled, misattributed, misinterpreted.

Of course, it's either hubris or ignorance that would lead anyone to believe the complexities of someone's life could be translated into a biography of any length, but especially a short artist's biography. And when looking back with no assistance to interpret a canceled meeting or a failed marriage, we draw the most ridiculous of assumptions from the smallest of inferences. It reminds me of high school, sitting around with girlfriends and trying to extract every possible ounce of meaning from something as mundane as "I'll call you later." Was he looking at you when he said it? Did he say "I'll call you later" or "I'll call you later tonight"? Again, hubris or ignorance to believe that so much could be mined from so little.

And, of course, we oversimplify, even as we over-complicate. So often, when we make plans, the end result is attributable to a dozen different factors - we're tired, we've had a cold, there's laundry that needs to be done, we don't like the people inviting us as much as we might, we've had a frustrating week at work, we don't have the extra funds for dinner out, etc. But historically, when we interpret people's lives, we just seem to give them only one motive. So few decisions boil down to just one pure reason, and it's this simplification that allows people like Jefferson and Lincoln to be depressive and selfish in the hands of one person while the same set of events with a different treatment makes them introspective and caring in the hands of another.

But in the end, my frustration with biographies is that they are frustratingly limited, perhaps inherently limited, in insight. Small details are left hanging everywhere! If you're going to make me believe that you can tie up someone's entire life in a biography, you have to chase down every loose end. Parrish had a long-term relationship with a woman, moving out of the main house, where his wife and children remained, to live with an "assistant" in his studio. After 50 years together, after the death of his wife, whom he never divorced, his mistress, now in her early 70s, left him to marry another man. A basic Google search for Parrish will reveal these details, but not a word about the late-date breakup. How can anyone not need to know what brought this about?

Perhaps that's the point, that the questions that determine our lives aren't even ones we recognize at the time or even see coming. In the moment, it's all so obvious that explanation is unnecessary, and to recreate a life in retrospect must require chaos theory. After all, we can barely know the people in front of us.

Weddings

I cry like a sap at weddings. Maybe it's because weddings are at the juncture of my inner cynic and my inner romantic, and the whole thing just wrenches me at that connecting point. So much of what is said at weddings is meaningless - not, of course, on the part of the couple, but in the larger sense. All those phrases like "till death do we part" and "let no man put asunder" just don't mean anything, even if we want them to. The small cynical voice in my head often adlibs a voiceover track - "unless that man is a divorce lawyer," etc. When people stand there saying the words, they may not want to get out, but in today's world, they know they can, and that makes things feel different. We pretend that marriage is permanent, we hope that it is, but in our hearts, we know very little in life is permanent or at least that very little has to be.

I think I cry because it's all so hopeful. All those hopes, all that faith in what you've told each other and what you hope for from each other, all that belief in the benevolence of an unpredictable future. There's hope in frightening qualities, and I think it only hits me harder as I grow older, because along the road in life, you see more and more of the damage people can do to each other. A wedding is, in some senses, an entrance ramp to a very dangerous highway, and after you've driven the highway for awhile, you witness carnage that you wouldn't have imagined, in places that you wouldn't have expected it. But a wedding is like watching people you love pull out onto that highway. You feel love and hope and fearful concern, you wish them all the luck in the world, and you're horrified by what they're going to see as they travel together. Unlike a wedding, a marriage never really has a happy ending - if you aren't separated by choice, eventually you'll be separated by circumstance.

May in Review

May was a bad month! Only three books, including one that I didn't really care for. (Also, apologies to my lovely fine-free library, because the spring publishing rush backed me up! No need to send bills - I'm returning them....)

Finally got around to Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy which has been lying around here since January. I always enjoy her books, aside from the ridiculously awkward attempts she makes at interjecting sex scenes, because she delves into the history of a different aspect of New York each time. And this time, it was the New York Public Library! And, as a bonus, map and print collectors. As always, I tend to wish I remembered as much about her plots as I remember about the institutions or locations she focuses on, but it's not a perfect world. Nice beach material at worst.

Laurie King's The Language of Bees was more enjoyable. Occasionally a little lighter on historic material than Fairstein, or at least less hard history in terms of dates and places, but much better for plot and atmosphere. I wish social clubs were still in vogue. (And I wish that people I'd actually find interesting would be members, if they were....) I did have the pleasure of dinner at the Queen City Club in Cincinnati while I was reading this, and the big paneled rooms filled with art and bookshelves, watching it rain while munching on macaroons (I would consider membership just for them alone), gave me a nice framework for the imagination during some of The Language of Bees. Also some great accounts of the challenges faced in the early days of flight. Flying over the crags of Scotland in bad weather in the 1920s - not for the faint of heart! I enjoy Mary Russell far more than Kate Martinelli for some reason; it may not be just me, as the two series feel so completely different that it seems they must have been written by two separate authors.

And after that, for reasons known only to Entertainment Weekly's best of 2008 list, I subjected myself to Disquiet by Julia Leigh, which was, at least, short. I hate it when I come away from a book thinking, "I just don't get it," but that's exactly what happened here. Not to fault her prose, which had lovely moments, but I'm not a fan of literature that feels obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. I suppose at my heart, I believe that writing is about communicating, and I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would choose to communicate confusion or be praised for communicating vagueness. I think this comes back to Nancy's Pearl discussion about how readers enter books; people enter through four "doorways": language, plot, character or setting. All books, of course, have these doorways, but most books have much "larger" doorways in one area or another. And the great works of fiction - The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind, Huckleberry Finn - those books have large doorways across the board. I've found that of the four, language is least likely to induce me, at least without the accompaniment of one of the other three, and that was the case with Disquiet. Yet another example of good writing that does not necessarily make for good reading.

June is already much more promising with four titles polished off already, and two new gifts from the library!

Promise

So, last weekend, I went home, back to my old high school, and watched my nephew graduate. Weird in itself that I've been out of high school long enough for someone to be born and go all the way through high school, but more than that somehow. There are places and events that are so richly filled with memory that the thin membrane that is time becomes even thinner, and you can step back and see your old self.

I found myself sitting next to the me that I was at 17, at the senior awards assembly with a lap full of awards for academic achievements, national writing contests, and scholarships. (I'd had a good year - my brother, the chronic underachiever in high school, came home and told my grandmother she really should have come to the Hollie and a Few Other People Awards Ceremony....) I had (I think everyone does, really) all these ideas about who I was, who I would be, what the adult world was like. And they were, of course, all wrong. Thankfully, in some cases....

Perhaps this is all one of those issues of cosmic timing. I'd been reading Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, an insightful novel regarding both the Ivy League admissions process and the expectations we have for life. Each year, exceptional kids rise through the ranks to apply for college, full of insight and idealism (and, in many cases, bullshit), positive that their feet are on the path to enlightenment and wealth and fame. We're also so convicted at that age in the belief that that path is the one, the only, the one true way, and anything else is destined to be disastrous.

Where, in the end, are all these exceptional people? That's the cruelest lesson for the overachiever - the reality that at the end of the day, even the most promising of students usually ends up married, living in the suburbs, overworked, semi-satisfied with marriage and career, underpaid, void of intellectual curiosity, and crafting in their children the same desire, the same search for exceptionality.

And so we question ourselves. How did we get here? Was it all because we chose one college instead of another? Should we have picked a different major? Should we not have changed our majors in our sophomore year? Could we have tried harder, taken more difficult courses? What was all that for anyway? Do we still contain that promise unrealized or did we just fool everyone around us into believe that we had any promise to begin with?

Graduations, I think, are more poignant than weddings. There's so much hope, so palpable and so many expectations that will morph into other things, if they survive at all. At a wedding, the hope is hope you place in another person - the hope that they will be all they say they will be, that they remain who you think they are. In some ways, it isn't as serious, because realistically, we all know that people will disappoint, will change, will require us to adjust or reshape our vision. At a graduation, that hope is for yourself - that you will be all you say you will be, that you will remain who you think you are, and when the adjustment to that vision comes, it is, by nature, much more personal.

Exceptional is rare, and for most, unsustainable. Some of us "peak early," achieving more noteworthy things in our junior year of high school than in the rest of our lives, while some of us just arc delicately through the rarified air of "exceptional," only to find ourselves at some point wafting down into mediocrity. Some of us achieve exceptional in our professional lives, but barely get off the ground in our personal lives as human beings. Some of us just burn up on reentry. As they sit there in caps and gowns, hot and excited, bored with everything around them but so aware, we wonder who is who. Will we ever know? Will they?

April in Review

Before it's May....

Let's see - started off with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, the nonfiction account of a little Hmong girl with epilepsy and the treatment conflicts between her parents and her doctors. Religion, literacy, economics, etc. all played a part in the mess that Lia's life becomes, and you wonder how two groups who both want the best for a child can both be so wrong and so incapable of finding common ground to work together. Fadiman also exposes some critical flaws in mainstream medicine - the inability of many practitioners to treat patients as a whole, the inability of professionals (and patients) to accept death, the belief that modern medicine knows most and knows best.

I wondered if things wouldn't have gone more smoothly with some of the acceptance present in Franz Lidz's account of his uncles, Unstrung Heroes. The Lidz men all suffered from mental illness in some form, and as a result, often lived along the margins of society, but through Lidz's account of his uncles, frank and unembarrassed by their struggles and idiosyncracies, the marginalized of our society begin to seem more entertaining and interesting. Frustrating and unreasonable, yes, but also whimisical and unselfish. How can you not love someone who collects found shoelaces? Everyone, especially anyone struggling with mental illness, should have someone who loves them as Franz Lidz loves his uncles.

In a month that now seems filled with somber topics, I also waded into Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. All academic work should be so honest; Gordon-Reed admits from the beginning that her belief on whether or not Jefferson and Hemings had a relationship can change from one minute to the next, and that's an important admission, because her research is not, as is often thought, intended so much as to make a case for the existence of the relationship, but to expose and question the belief that such a relationship wasn't possible. For instance, scholars have historically been skeptical of the late-life remembrances of Sally Hemings' children, while accepting unquestioningly the accounts of Jefferson's grandchildren. Gordon-Reed, an attorney, puts the basic structure of trial evidence to work and rightfully questions inconsistencies like this. If we can't rely on the Hemings family oral tradition, why should we rely on the Jefferson family oral tradition? Sadly, the discussion often leaves little basis for the difference in treatment beyond race, but reading Gordon-Reed's lambasting of various historians and their sloppy scholarship will guarantee that you never read histories or biographies the same way again!

Part of the reason I only made it through four books this month was Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden. It was one of those books that I enjoyed so much, I kept picking it up and putting it down again, wanting to read it and knowing that would mean it would end. I read her first novel, The House at Riverton, last year, and found this to be almost as enjoyable, if a little convoluted. It's hard to avoid convolution when you have four female leads spread out through as many generations and on two different continents, a more ambitious undertaking than The House at Riverton, which was told in flashbacks, but mostly focused on one family, one manor house, and one generation. Still, it was just so carefully paced that I enjoyed moving through it and took my time. She's an Australian writer, and the recent globalization of publishing has added her to my list of authors to follow, along with Kate Atkinson, Steig Larsson, John Harwood, and Susan Fletcher.

Just My Imagination

So, once again, Mother's Day, otherwise known as the day I would prefer to spend under the bed. Honestly, I think about draping blankets over the side until they touch the floor and just crawling under there until I feel like rejoining the world. I cry every day for a week beforehand, feeling sorry for myself and then berating myself for being so silly. I wish I didn't feel this way, and I realize it's probably not very adult, but when everything around you is about celebrating something you don't have, that you barely remember having, avoidance does seem to be what comes to mind.

That's probably one of the saddest things about death. The reality is that the farther you get from it, the fewer people still care or at least are still aware. The people closest start off with the sharpest memories, and as time grinds the edges off, most people end up with memories that don't poke and prod at them very often. You end up struggling with something that's invisible to everyone else.

Lately, I shop for her in my imagination, ticking off books that I've read that she would have loved. (That is probably the greatest sadness for me - my mother was the only person I've ever known who read nearly as much as I do. I'm sure there are other people who do, but no one I've meet, let alone know well enough to chat with.) Imaginary retail therapy, kept to myself, seems to help. I can't buy for myself - unwilling to spend money on small vanities like nail polish, persuading myself that hard water would only damage a copper kettle, noting how infrequently I'd have an opportunity to wear a cashmere scarf. Besides, if she were here, sometimes I think I wouldn't want for those sorts of things. I don't know, but I suspect they are the kinds of things your mom buys you for no reason. Buying presents, however, would likely be the quickest path to bankruptcy for me, and I always see things that I would buy for Mom. Dichroic glass pendants, red brocade wallets, heavy pottery mugs with vellum-esque glazes. This year, I'd be leaning toward Sing Them Home, some pricey organic coffee, and one of the beautiful bleeding hearts from the Italian greenhouse down the road. Imaginary shopping for an imaginary relationship seems appropriate.

Of course, in my imagination, she's always whole and happy. Her eyes are bright, her hands don't shake, and she laughs. She squeezes my hand, tucks my hair behind my ear. She is who she was on the good days, and she gets to be my mother instead of me being hers. That's the best part about imagination: when you're telling the story, you can tell it however you want.

My Brother

Yesterday, my little brother had a birthday. He probably wouldn't want me to announce his age, but I will say that he's old enough that I don't remember his first one. That always amazes me, the fact that I don't have any memory of his advent in my life, because when it comes to someone's whose existence, whose entrance into the world, I'd want to celebrate, he's at the top of the list.

But, still no memories. I don't remember Mom's pregnancy, staying with grandparents while she was in the hospital, or the red, wrinkly, suspicious bundle that became my brother coming home. No, really - he was suspicious. Even in his first hospital picture, suitably dated by lighter-burned edges and shellacked wood plaque, he's turned partially away from the camera, squinting with his one open eye in a manner that clearly says he suspects everyone and isn't really sure about anything. Either that, or he's reacting like a hamster to the bright camera light, but knowing him as I do, I interpret it as a cosmic wariness that's never really left him. I don't remember being consulting on the naming of the at-the-time-hypothetical brother either, but have been told that I had creative suggestions. (I was two, I wanted a dog, I suggested the name Shadow - what can I say?)

Later, I remember his blue footie pajamas, his constant smell of baby shampoo and dirt, his fascination with tying knots in my jumprope and disassembling my dollhouse. I remember his presence in the dark, when we were both working hard to keep each other from being frightened. I can still conjure the memory of his hand in mine at a funeral, of the quick lie to cover for my mistakes, of Saturday morning arguments over channel 5 versus channel 12. I see a glib teenager vaulting off the edge of a moving haywagon to chase down my baseball cap and a little boy surveying a dammed creek with his hands on his hips. In my dark moments, I hear his voice in my head, the words he used to encourage me to throw caution to the wind when we were small: "We're Davises. We can do anything." Twenty-five years later, when I married, those words are the reason I didn't change my name.

Still, there's no milestone to mark his arrival in my life. Despite that fact that I have memories as early as 12-18 months and that he came along when I was 2 1/2, my mind didn't mark this momentous occasion in any meaningful way. Maybe that's as it should be. I have no first memory of him, just like I have no first memory of the other innate loves of my life. No memory of learning to read, no memory of first loving the presence of a kitty cat, no memory of my brother - he's just always there.

Innate love is a deceptive thing. People think unconditional love is something pleasant and easy, and perhaps it is for the recipient, but not for the giver. For the giver, unconditional love hurts. It worries, it disappoints, it frustrates, it angers, it infuriates. It's not that you don't experience those things with unconditional love, I learned early in life, it's just that they don't make it go away. People look for different metaphors for the enduring timelessness of love - oceans, mountains, rivers - but love's really not that elegant and majestic. In fact, if I search the landscape of my childhood for a symbol, love is multiflora rose - introduced without warning into my environment, it took root and spread with the tenacity of steel. You can hack a multiflora rose down to the ground, pour gas on the roots, set it on fire, and within months, it will be flourishing again. As mentioned, it's not elegant, but frankly, neither is love.